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This is going to be a thread on my L6 just because it’s gone through so many changes I can’t keep track. Lol

First up is amp draw measurements with the stock driver and various resistors.

I received my new Uni-T UT210E so my current measurements will be in line with others here. I used a 6” length of 10 gauge wire on the tail cap. I measured both the Liitokala and KeepPower 5200 protected cells. Emitter was the xhp70. I only tested each for maybe 5 seconds so I could do a lot of tests without having to fully recharge the batteries each time. The hundredths place was rounded to the nearest 0 or 5. Springs are bypassed with mesh copper braid used for desoldering.

First up is the stock FX-30 driver with the 2 R082 resistors, no mods.

Liitokala
Turbo/high = 4.60 amps
Med = 2.55 amps
Low = 0.55 amps

KeepPower
Turbo/high = 5.10 amps
Med = 1.90 amps
Low = 0.45 amps

Kind of strange, I double checked it. Does anyone have a answer as to why the Liitokala were so low on turbo compared to the KP, yet the lower levels seemed normal? This is the first time I paired my Liitokala’s with an unmodded driver so the results are surprising.

Next is with an R100 resister stacked on top of the 2 R082’s.

Liitokala
Turbo/high = 7.00 amps
Med = 2.60 amps
Low = 0.55 amps

KeepPower
Turbo/high = 5.70 amps
Med = 1.90 amps
Low = 0.45 amps

Next is with no added resister, but added a wire across.

Liitokala
Turbo/high = 7.70 amps
Med = 2.70 amps
Low = 0.55 amps

KeepPower
Turbo/high = 6.10 amps
Med = 1.95 amps
Low = 0.45 amps

So 7.7 amp is the most I can get from this driver with the xhp70. My borrowed meter read 8.1, but all it’s readings were a little bit higher compared to the Uni-T meter. Also, all my readings on the next lower power level showed the Liitokala as 0.70 amp higher than the KP.

I’m going to stick with the R100 mod for the time being. Once I get my lux meter back I’ll do some comparisons between batteries to see how much brighter just a battery swap can be. I’ve also got some R082 and R120 resistors I can try, but I doubt there will be much difference over the R100. Plus it’s a pain soldering those things. Maybe a smaller soldering tip would help.

After modding the stock driver I bought a non-Convoy FX30 driver from Kaidomain. Not the Convoy version, the original.

This has a unique interface not described on the website. The tail switch puts it into standby and the side switch only has 3 brightness levels plus a strobe. You can turn the light on and off from the side switch. Very odd. I made a quick video on YouTube showing how it works and went into more details on it.

I just installed it and was quite surprised. For those folks who want a regulated output, non direct drive, along with the ability to turn it on/off from the side switch, this is the only driver I know of. It’s mode spacing is not very good, but it’s not that big a deal to me.

I did a direct wire across the sense resistors so I’ll see how it holds up at work tonight.

I got a good reading here, but I might have been able to use the main red wire to the led since I think this driver feeds battery power directly to the LED and the negative lead goes through the driver to control output. I never did confirm that.

The switch looks like it uses an 1206 2012/0805 sized led and the 2 bare wire pads on back go to one of each led pad. The other led pads seem to link together and connect to the blue wire. The blue wire is a ground.

I could probably add a floating resistor into the wire from that positive source to either the purple or yellow pad on the back of the switch.

It seems these leds vary from 2 to 3 volts depending on color. I found using a 15k ohm resistor worked well, but a bigger one is fine, too. It’s just a bit less bright.

I experimented with slicing the dome off the xhp70 and we’ll as trying out the xhp50.2. I also swapped to a SMO reflector and cut the bottom out then clamped down the emitter.

I did a ceiling bounce with the FX30 driver with R100 resistor added. I measured using a sliced-dome xhp70 and a dome-on xhp70. Both are N4 1A. I also compared the Liitokala against the KeepPower 5200 protected cell. I’ve already shown the Liitokala pulls more amps (7A) compared to the KeepPowers (5.7A) and here is proof they put out more light as well.

Sliced dome
KeepPower – 343
Liitokala – 377

Dome on
KeepPower – 400
Liitokala – 460

Crunching numbers:
The sliced dome looses you 14% light output on the KeepPowers and 18% on the Liitokalas. You loose lumens, but gain a more intense focus which means longer distance. Slicing the dome also helps to reduce the donut hole some.

The Liitokalas give you a 10% boost over the KeepPowers with a sliced dome and a 15% boost over the KeepPowers with the dome on. You can see the brighter output.

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I cut the bottom out of the SMO reflector and fabbed some very thin copper shims to play with the emmiter to reflector distance. I also swapped to new, longer screws to clamp down the emitter for good heat transfer.

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Here’s a quick comparison of the Convoy L6 with SMO reflector and xhp70 with the dome on and with it sliced off.

The sliced dome looses you 14% to 18% of lumens, but you gain a more intense focus which means longer distance. Slicing the dome also helps to reduce the donut hole some.

The smaller emitter size with the dome removed directly translates into a smaller hotspot.

I just finished my lighted side switch. A complete success on the first try!

This light has the FX30 driver from Kaidomain with the weird firmware that let’s you turn the light on and off with the side switch. The only problem is telling if the rear switch is on or off. I’m always double checking it. Now I always know plus can find the switch in the dark. No more fumbling for it! Yay!

First I filed out some notches to the switch hole to allow easier driver swaps. Kudos to Kawiboy for the suggestion. Note that the top and bottom lips are very thin, but the sides are very thick. So it’s very quick and easy to file in the locations where mine are.

Then I took 2 white SMD LEDS, kudos to DBCUSTOM for the LEDs, and added them like in my diagram above.

I bridged the rear connector to get power to both LEDs. The resistor is a 15K ohm. I believe that’s equivalent to 7.5k ohm per LED. It’s bright enough, but not too bright. The amp draw went from 1.45 milliamp to 1.85 milliamp. So no big deal for me.

Here’s a video of it. I’m a bit long winded. Lol

The clear switch covers are from Convoy. Simon uses them on the clear version of the L6. He will send you some only for the cost of shipping (a couple dollars) or if you buy something he can add them to the order for free.

The LEDs I got from DBCustom. I’m pretty sure they are sized 0805/2012. They are cheap if ordered from china. EBay has lots of them.

At first I thought 1206 leds would fit, but as you can see, they are a little big for the switch pads.

Normally it doesn’t matter which switch wire (red or blue) goes to ground and which goes to the “switch signal” part of the driver because it’s a simple contact switch. When you add LEDs, the polarity of the switch wires suddenly become important because the LEDs are polarity sensitive and share a ground wire with the switch.

Since the blue switch wire is a common ground (for 3 things, the switch, the left LED and the right LED) you want to make sure it’s going to a ground source. If it’s not, you need to swap the switches red and blue wires around where they make contact on the driver.

If you switch wires were backward then that might have been what caused your problem. You might have fed 3 or so volts into the switch positive trigger when its designed to only sense ground.

Polarity of the LEDs is also important. They need to be like this.

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Now if your using a different momentary switch you’ll need to map out its traces on the pcb. I just used the continuity circuit on my multimeter.

Here is the switch from the FX30 again. All the blue dots go to the blue wire. Red dots to red wire.

I just got my TA driver installed. Everything works including the lighted side switch! Yeah, I’m 2 for 2.

It’s pulling 12 amps with the Liitokalas at 4.1 volt. Yikes! It might be higher when fully charged. Maybe I should NOT have used 18ga wires? I need to tone it down a little.

The scary thing is after about 10 or 15 seconds I see the light color start to shift towards blue/purple. I quickly turned it down in brightness. Maybe the 20mm DTP copper star is having trouble with that heat? (EDIT, it was my copper shims, not the star or LED)

For those that want to use a lighted side switch on the TexaS Avenger FET driver in the L6, here is the basic layout.

My “power on” led resistor broke in two when I tried to put test probes on it to measure the resistance. I hope that’s not a sign that there was an issue with the solder paste. Update, I broke the resistor, paste was fine.

Since I’m running 2 leds in parallel I’ll swap that 4,700 ohm resistor for something double in size. 10k to 20k should be fine. I used a 15K resistor.

BTW, I swapped the white leds to red leds to the switch this time around just to be different. They are not as bright as the whites, but still okay.

I decided to see how much throw I could get. I bought a SMO reflector to experiment with. I shined it on the ceiling with the stock centering ring and then I removed the ring and added some insulating tape to the bottom of the reflector. This allowed the reflector to sit lower which changed the focus. You can see in this picture how lowering the reflector just a tiny bit reduces the size of the corona and puts that light into the hotspot which increases the lux.

I knew this required more investigating so I cut the bottom off the reflector and bought some new, longer panhead screws to bolt the emitter down.

I also experimented by slicing off the xhp70 dome. You can see that this shrinks the hot spot and increases the intensity.

I bought an inexpensive LX1330B lux meter and did measurements at 5 meters, at about 30 seconds in and with fully charged KeepPower protected 5200 batteries. I then calculated it back to 1 meter.

With the stock driver and OP reflector I got 58,000 lux or 481 meters.

Then I added an R082 resistor and got 65,000 lux or 510 meters.

Swapping in a stock SMO reflector gave 81,250 lux or 570 meters

I then tried a new xhp70 of the same N4 1C bin, but I got slightly better results.

Next I cut the bottom out of the SMO reflector so I could adjust the focus better.
I got 92,500 lux or 608 meters.

Next I sliced the dome off.
I got 115,000 lux or 678 meters

I pretty much stopped there. Even though my measurements are lower than others, I did pretty much double my lux from 58,000 to 115,000.

Matt at Adventure Sport Flashlights did most of the same mods, but his measurements were all higher. He ended up doubling his lux as well, so I think we are about even.

Here’s his video on it.

One potential reason Matt got higher numbers may have been due to batteries. After all these lux measurements I bought some Liitokala 5000’s to compare to my original Keeppower protected 5200’s. My battery tests show the Liitokala cells always drew more amps than the KeepPower (7 amps compared to 5.7 amps). This extra amp draw results in higher lumen output. Maybe Matt was running better batteries than me? We did use the same model lux meters, as well.

My thrower version of the L6 with R100 added to FX30 driver and SMO reflector. This is before the FET driver. The stock light could never reach those warehouses. With the FET installed, it’s even better than these pics! Lol

Here’s a few shots of the xhp50.2

I tried it at 2 slightly different reflector heights. They are pretty similar. The 50.2 with dome on seems to match the size of the xhp70 with sliced dome. I’m guessing the 50.2 with a sliced dome would shrink the hotspot size again.

With the camera settings turned down you can see the dark center.

I probably should have taken a few lux meter measurements while I had the 50.2 installed, but I didn’t. I ended up buying a new xhp70 to put back in and I adjusted the reflector depth to give a bigger corona creating a smoother hotspot while reducing throw. I don’t need max throw, just a good compromise between throw and a nice looking hotspot.

Wow! Nice job on this! Just updated my Convoy L6 with the latest NarsilM v1.0 and all is working well. Ramping is doing good Pulls 18A, 186 kcd, intense hot spot, no black hole with SMO reflector, running the XHP70.2 P2 3B, 8,090 lumens @30 secs. This is with dome, but hoping to try sliced dome next.

Last night with 2 LK 5000's at 4.00V, it still gets 15A on a clamp meter. Last night I added solder blobs on the LK's. Before I was using a JAXMAN spring adapter between the cells, but the spring was bypassed with a short 24 AWG wire.

Just tried setting moon level to PWM value of 1 via the UI and it's wild - the XHP70.2 literally barely glows - noticeable but not measurable - amazing. You can tell it's on because the yellow of the phosphor turns slightly whiter than the phosphor on the LED base.

I use Narsil v1.2 so I can have the lvp, but you can’t have that and thermal monitoring at the same time.

Maybe v1.2 has a timed stepdown?

That’s no big deal as I use my hand to monitor temperature. For normal use I adjust to slightly below turbo output. You still get bright output, but much less heat and battery load. That’s much more practical. Then as the voltage runs down I go back to full output.

I save the full output with fresh cells for testing or showing off. Lol

The stock driver is a buck driver, tailcap amps are basically a useless measurement for buck and boost drivers.

Buck drivers keep a constant output current but the input current will vary with voltage. Higher input voltage = lower input amps and vice versa. So in this case the lower the amps, the better the battery.

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It’s funny because I’ve done a ton of amp draws on the FX30 and never noticed the amp draw at the tail increase as the batteries went down. In fact, as the batteries went down I could notice the output (both amperage and lumens) dropping. It did stay pretty bright at first, but below 3.7v or so it was noticably dimmer.

I wonder why these driver specifics were never mentioned before in any of the L6 threads?

I and others have mentioned them before many times. Even put the driver though a full test on the bench to see exactly what it did.

The output remained more or less constant from an input voltage of 8.4V down to around ~7.8V. The output them spiked a bit for some reason from 7.8-7.6V before dropping back to normal until it could not maintain regulation anymore. Somewhere in the low 7V range (which would be about 3.7v per cell). Although all of this is from memory, so don’t take those voltages as gospel.

At that point it was just a high resistance direct drive driver and output would drop as voltage dropped.

This is exactly what you would expect from a cheap buck driver and how it is supposed to work (minus the spike in output in the 7.7V range).

I did try the xhp50.2 with the FX30 and wire across the resistors. I didn’t have my clamp meter then, but I think the amp draw was 9 or 10 amps. I didn’t even think the FX30 could handle that much without smoking something.

They are very similar, but you can’t have both low voltage protection and the indicator led on the 2 cell version of this driver.

Narsil v1.2 has LVP, but no temperature support or indicator led support.

Narsil V1.4 does not have LVP, but does have temperature support and indicator led support.

Basically the indicator is a little fancier than the power indicator. It can be programmed to stay on when the rear switch is on or you can manually turn it off. When you do a battery check the main beam as well as indicator led blink at the same time.

With my light I only needed the power indicator so that I know when the rear switch is on and off. So I chose to have the LVP and no indicator led or temperature support. I can measure the temperature with my hand. Lol

Here is what Lexel said about the indicator led.

Lexel wrote:

The firmware supports an indicator/locator LED as described in the manual feed from MCU pin 7

some quoted from manual:
“An Indicator LED (SMD LED) is supported as a locator LED and low voltage indicator
The functions of the indicator LED are also availiable on the main LED, but you can configure it to indicator only, both or main LED only
The locator can be enabled “Enable/disable the Locator LED feature (locate the flashlight in the dark)”

So you can use the indicator LED maybe as well as power LED
“Indicator LED
When enabled, the Indicator LED can be used for the following:
- to locate the flashlight in the dark (Locator feature)
- to blink out the battery level
- as a secondary indicator of blinking when the main LED blinks
When the Locator feature is enabled, the LED can be temporarily turned OFF (only in Mode Sets), with the main LED OFF, 1
quick click followed by a click&hold til the main LED goes off. To toggle it back on, repeat the same procedure (OFF -> quick
click, click&hold). Note the locator feature is turned OFF when the light is in Lock-Out.”

so the locator needs to be enabled after you turned off the light via Eswitch manually.

A power on LED just needs to be connected to positive from battery and the ground
those connections are availiable on the bleeder resistor pad